The controversial surrogate pregnancy, illegal in Spain and legal in some countries, is a growing industry that is increasingly being used by older people, “which is a worrying trend,” according to an expert who has been working for more than two years. decades offering advice to interested families.
A debate that has been put back on the table after the presenter and actress Ana Obregón, 68, has gone to the practice of a woman’s surrogacy in Miami (Florida), a state where this technique is allowed. of assisted reproduction, with an economic contribution in between.
“We are increasingly seeing older people turning to surrogacy without sufficiently planning what will happen if they die before their children are adults,” Sam Everingham, director of the Growing Families support group for surrogacy, told EFE. It is based in Australia and provides its services globally.
“Growing Families has seen a 150 percent increase in inquiries from prospective parents over the age of 50 in the last three years,” Everingham says, adding that inquiries come from all over the world.
The director of Growing Families, an NGO established in the year 2000 in Australia, where only altruistic surrogacy is allowed (without economic exchange in between), finds several reasons behind this trend.
“I think that the confinements due to the covid made couples and single people without children rethink their priorities and investigate more the options to start a family,” he says.
In addition, he adds, “the fact that people over 50 are healthier than they were two decades ago, the greater number of options and the usual lack of restrictions on the age of potential parents in many countries have led to to this change.”
Everingham, who advocates promoting international agreements in this regard, emphasizes that the situation varies by country: “In Canada, the applicant couple cannot add up to more than one hundred years. In the US, it usually depends on the clinic. In Argentina there are no age limits,” he says.
While, in Greece, for example, its access is limited to heterosexual couples and women under 50 years of age and in India it is required that the father be no more than 55 years old and the woman not exceed 50.
In her experience, the main countries that people go to to find a surrogate are the United States, Canada, Georgia, Mexico and Colombia. “Some emerging ones are Greece, Argentina and Kazakhstan,” she adds.
He also believes that Thailand, which banned commercial surrogacy in 2015 after being the epicenter of the practice in Asia for years, “may be discussing restarting it.”
The Australian affirms that, in general, “demand is increasing” throughout the world and, according to his NGO, the countries with the most requests per capita are Israel, China and Australia.
For its part, the consultancy Global Markets Insights affirms that businesses around surrogacy generated around 14,000 million dollars in 2022 in the world, a figure that the firm calculates will increase to 129,000 million in 2032.
